In recent years, spread of wireless terminals such as smartphones and mobile phones has significantly increased mobile traffic. Under circumstances surrounding telecommunications carriers, such increase in the mobile traffic makes a demand for the ability to support high traffic.
In this regard, telecommunications carriers have placed importance on area coverage and population coverage in competition with other telecommunications carriers. However, as the competition becomes fiercer and fiercer, the telecommunications carriers place more importance on the quality that users feel with information communication services, that is, the quality of experience (QoE) as a point of differentiation from the other carriers. Generally, the QoE for a certain data flow lowers as the time to complete transmission or reception of the data flow increases.
Meanwhile, in conventional wireless communication systems, a wireless terminal selects a wireless base station to be coupled thereto by using criteria based on the radio conditions at the site and a type of radio access technology (RAT). A possible case involving selecting a wireless base station is a case where the wireless terminal is powered on, where handover of the wireless terminal occurs because the wireless terminal moves from an area of a wireless base station to another area. For such a case of wireless base station selection, the conventional wireless communication systems employ a mechanism to select a wireless base station the measured radio conditions of which is better.
In terms of the method of selecting a wireless base station, one of conventional techniques changes a type of information for use in determination in accordance with a type of data to be transferred. Another conventional technique predicts a packet error rate (PER) and uses the predicted PER to predict a throughput for selecting a wireless access point. Still another conventional technique performs handover only when the throughput is expected to increase. The existing technical documents thereof include Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication Nos. 2007-134993, 2007-110373, and 2008-270990.